In reality, few people actually need to be managed this way, and even fewer work well under its dark shadow. In the new engagement economy, people become remarkable when they feel well prepared and know what's expected. We have seen during the great lockdown that work continued unsupervised. Our businesses had whole management teams stay home, and the organizations remained standing.
Volunteerism: The New Competitive Advantage
Today, businesses filled with engaged people – those whose people voluntarily invest their discretionary effort at work – are still the exception. But we know that those who achieve volunteerism hold a strong competitive advantage, while their more traditional peers continue to lose ground, as their employees defect or continue to take a salary without giving their all. It's quite astounding how many businesses are still tethered by inertia to the old ways of managing people.
Clean and Meaningful, Not Lean and Mean
Gone are the days of a strictly ordered workplace where a productive and efficient workforce clocked in, did what they were paid to do, and clocked out again. This low baseline had all but vanished years ago. Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we saw whole teams rise up to challenging times, to change needing implementation overnight. They proved they could do it. Those underengaged people whom many managers believed were change resistant or fatigued made a world of difference. The danger is, of course, that the businesses will revert to type. They will fall back into the slow-move world. But where's the incentive to keep the new world and not slip back? We must create one.
Engaged people will willingly lead their companies out of economic holes. They will innovate and create. Engaged people will be at the finish line (if such a place exists); they will also have the reward of working for a fit and healthy business, even a happy one.
Sadly, most businesses have been far from this ideal: the environment they fostered does not inspire people to innovate and help inspire the future. One must ask the question, did the quest for productivity cost us the hearts and minds of our people? The survey results reflect an astounding yes. That could cost companies a great deal more than just the loss of their soul.
Consider a trip down the corporate history lane with the well-known story of 3M. If you were in business at the birth of the Post-It note, you might remember 3M as a business built on novel ideas. But that wasn't the case when James McNerney took the helm in 2001. While the former General Motors executive was able to rejuvenate 3M's share price, it's widely believed that he failed to reenergize its people. After a transformation program built on downsizing and efficiency gains, innovation had all but come to a standstill. It was only after George Buckley replaced McNerney in 2005 and reestablished people as the key drivers of success that it began to report record results once again. The contrast is stark: people as part of a systemic, process-driven culture versus people as the force of a culture that respects the use of processes but isn't a slave to them. In the latter case, the organizational infrastructure works for people, freeing them up to be remarkable – and creating a human competitive edge. This is just a great baseline example of a business that has now lasted the long tail and survived the ups and downs of another decade and a half. It's this leg work years ago that provide for the stories of corporate longevity.
Of course, today everybody talks about Google's 20 percent time, allowing people to work on their own ideas. But it doesn't have to be this big. It can be day-to-day actions, within the day-to-day role of people, that can bring about remarkable changes in results.
If the Pants Fit, Wear Them
A fit business is a healthy workplace comprising collaborative teams, which are powered by common sense, common values, and trust – energized by initiative at every level, and aware of what they're aiming for, and how to use their business infrastructure to best advantage.
A fit business has a highly engaged and collaborative leadership team whose members are in sync with one another and their teams. They cultivate a sense of purpose that is greater than profit and financial results. It is a healthy business bubbling with opportunity for sales and human growth, powered by those who show up for work – and who are all in, every day.
In such a business, people feel known, cared about, helped, inspired, led, and mobilized – and have the freedom to act for the good of the organization. Able to use their own discretion, they in turn volunteer their discretionary effort. Everyone goes HeadsUp. They lift their noses out of their devices and connect with people.
A fit and healthy business is characterized by a different way of managing and a different management model. Managers who can bring focus to people – but will then get out of the way and let them achieve – will win the war on talent.
Fit and Healthy – The Human Competitive Edge
The drive to innovate management practices has been slow to build. The surveys show it. The underenthused demonstrate it. Why? For the most part, businesses continue to recruit, train, structure, lead, reward, recognize, decide, develop, and grow their people in much the same way they did decades ago
It's easy to mistake IT investment and new HR processes for progress. But has anything fundamentally changed in the way a business is run and managed? We haven't invested in thinking about the management models and their ability to promote individuals’ discretionary effort – that propensity to go the extra mile. But the model drives management behavior, and management behavior drives employee behavior and engagement. Companies lose out as a result, because this discretionary effort could and should be their competitive advantage.
Imagine the advantage you are sitting on if you address this.
The Chariots Are on Fire
People don't want to be managed the same way we have managed for the past 100 or even 1,000 years. Egypt's pyramids, Rome's Coliseum, and Henry Ford's automotive factory were built by versions of management that are still in use today.
The imperative now is for management innovation – not just product, process, or service innovation. The successful employers of the future will be living, breathing organisms filled with fluid clusters of people – not a series of organizational boxes that can be mapped neatly on a chart.
But before we can reinvent our management models, we must understand what these new models should be inspired by: not shiny new systems and technology, but human emotions and the spirit of what it means to actually be human. Humanize. Optimize. Digitize. In that order. Engaging people to enable results.
Financial Times columnist John Kay has written an entire book on this phenomenon (Obliquity): the idea of using a more indirect approach to achieve goals when the parameters are complex.5 He notes that this can apply when “the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them.”
Good, Better, Best, Never Let It Rest…
Engagement is about people, and wherever people are involved, complexity abounds. So, the aim here is not to prescribe a new management model, but rather to prompt you to see better ways of managing. All too often, we view engagement as an activity – or worse still, the ultimate outcome, when in fact, engagement is the very lifeblood of what should pump through the veins of our organizational DNA. It is the enabler of results, built ubiquitously into our everyday behavior.
In response to talent shortages, or economic fights for survival, and the growing need to build a good brand as an employer, companies have realized that they must now put as much effort into wooing and looking after employees as they do into attracting and nurturing customers. The problem is, leaders have